Motivation

I have been sculpting quite a lot of heads lately to improve my sculpting skills and I sort of have the feeling I'm starting to understand the anatomy of the head, which is actually one big puzzle. Once you know what goes on under the skin, a whole new world opens. A world full of freedom. By respecting the facial structure of a human being you can start sculpting your own wonderfully weird designs. So I thought it was time for me to do something else than generic heads, copies of references or digital doubles.

Concept and Modeling

What I absolutely love about ZBrush is the freedom an artist has. I started out from a very simple base head (Fig.01) and then began searching for a concept. I didn't really have a specific design in mind, but I was heavily inspired by the fantastic work of Schell Sculpture Studio. After concept sculpting for about two hours I had something I was quite happy about... back then anyway (Fig.02)!

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

I wanted to take the sculpt a little bit further this time in order to improve my rendering skills. I have been focusing on sculpting and anatomy so much lately that I'm kinda ignoring every other aspect. Once I got this design I liked in ZBrush, I had to retopologize the mesh. I prefer doing the retopo in another package than ZBrush, so I decided to use 3D-Coat. While there are a few different programs I could have used, I've always liked 3D-Coat's retopo tools. I think it's a very efficient program and its MAC compatible.

For most character artists, retopologizing is probably a boring job, and although I'm not a technical wizard myself, I kinda enjoy building a nice clean mesh. So I exported my ZBrush head at level 4 (mid level) as an OBJ and imported it into 3D-Coat for the retopo. After four hours I ended up with this new mesh (Fig.03).